Best Music Writing

So we all know that Pitchfork is unfriendly and elitist; that NME is a shit hype factory and that there is some awful writing on the interweb.
But what 'boot best stuff?
Let's have a celebratory thread for baller music writers and writings.
In the o8...

http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=390&Entry=CurrentIssue

^^ great lil wayne piece. props to j0rdan s. for digging this up

Josh Eells' piece on serving as Three 6 Mafia's assistant a couple Blenders back.

Excellent piece on Weezy - evocative, original, creatively structured and it leaves the novice reader wanting to find out more about the artist.

Wow, that Lil Wayne piece really is amazing. The whole way through I was thinking "I wish someone would teach me to write like that.

yeah, makes me want to hear lil wayne....that piece really has a lot of life and living in it...more than you ever read in a review.

LONG time since I read such an old school FT style review too.

i saw that on marc h0gan's tumblr so props go from me to him

The guys from The Wire usually know what they're talking about.

stay positive, ilx

http://grantland.com/features/wu-tang-clan-20th-anniversary-reunion-rza-gza-ghostface/

unbelievable. so epic. from the only american writer alive that i am jealous of:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html

I rarely am this earnest but I noticed that his e-mail address was linked to his name at the end of the piece so I decided to e-mail him a gushy fan letter. He replied minutes later.

Thanks so much for posting, Scott. Gonna send this link out to a few people (who are prob all over it, but just in case they're not,being busy folk).

Run out of good things to say about this guy.

Yeah, what an amazing article. Thanks for the link.

definitely one of the best dudes around

Just starting reading that. Wow. Still wondering how he is going to work in Vampire Weekend at the end.

I started the article skeptical, even tho I am a JJS fan. Another quest for mysterious vanished blues singers blah blah. But it's so good! And so much more than that -- it's as much about that genre as it is part of it -- and the payoffs just keep coming.

i e-mailed greil m. to rave about this and he said i wouldn't believe the stuff that they cut out of it. so i'm hoping their is an unabridged version in some future collection of his stuff.

Understand mothra trepidation as by now we have all already read many articles on this subject matter, many of which can quickly degenerate into a rehash of well-known facts, received opinions, fites -"Robert Johnson is the real deal! Is not! He is! is not!" - relatively new twists -"Did you know that almost all so-called blues singers actually also sang OTHER material including the popular songs of the day, but due to the demands of the recording industry..." and so on.

DO U SEE? Still have to read it properly, for all I know all that stuff is in there.

It is, in some ways. If was the first article you ever read about pre-war blues and recording and the obsessive collectors and ethnomusicologists who went in search of ghostly voices on old 78s, you would get all the necessary background. But he presents it with the context of this being an already familiar form, so if it's the 100th iteration you've read it doesn't feel tedious or pedantic.

Plus of course he's got hold of a great story.

haven't read the times story yet but strongo linked to this thing he wrote for the oxford american earlier this year, it's pretty great - http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2014/feb/18/chop-upbeat/

Thanks, balls! (That's not something I have reason to say very often.) Somebody I sent the Times link to just replied with this, by Michael Hall. Note date: McCormick's blues crisis/the blues' McCormick crisis well under way 12 years ago, as Sullivan indicates.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/mack-mccormick-still-has-blues

was excited for a sec that that meant 'something that strongo wrote'

The beginning did seem like the whole thing might turn out to be a rehash for noobs, but with this kind of subject you've got to balance it for old hands and those who came in late, relatively mass mainstream publications-wise, anyway. It's tricky (which is why I may lay off reviewing reissues for a while, if possible). He handles it pretty well, duh.

Is this really for real? Are we sure it isn't some kind of April Fools Day's joke two weeks late? There is some kind of weird almost sci-fi dimension to this: nobody at the beginning of the previous century left us a recording of Buddy Bolden, nobody tracked down the first person who sang
Line
Line
Another Line

So here at the beginning of this century, what is left for us to find. It's like a Ballard story "The Man Who Walked on the MoonGroove"

Oh wait. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=28883&width=320

digging deep into that NYT american-blues article now. it is epic.

From the Texas Monthly article:

In 1988 McCormick wrote in the Smithsonian's American Visions magazine that he had promised Johnson's killer that he wouldn't publish until the man died.

not only is the NYT piece an example of great writing, it's an example of great layout and savvy use of multimedia elements. the video clips that populate the article landscape help bring the story alive.

Agreed, and it also makes a case for the continued value of big media, or at least deep pockets. Anyone can publish anything now, but to pay for the kind of reporting and design presentation in this story takes serious resources.

Now if we could only get those guys to track down the lost bebop home demos from during the recording ban.

Or the lost take of "Is That All There Is?"

This story reminded me of the titular subject of this thread as well as at least one character in it

Dr3w's argument against 'best records'-lists (refusing to do a Baker's Dozen for tQ) is eloquent, intelligent en some fan-tas-tic writing

oh cool, can't wait to read this.

not a writer but v-blogger the needle drop seperates the men from the boys

can it just be assumed that I reposted this^ to every ILAFL thread ever

Great piece. All true of course bar one slight detail: we use lists to keep our heads just above water not to coin it in. Great writing. Great musician. Total hero.

anyway, the DD piece is great & the guy's a total zen guru. in defence of numbers? it's a scoundrel's defence, but they're a means of initiating a discourse (however flawed) in order to proselytise music in an efficient & copious way. this doesn't invalidate DD's arguments, though - just makes us all scoundrels :D

Doran, if he chose to bless tQ with such elegant & voluble writing, he obviously digs your site regardless of its occasional reductivity ;)

The piece was written with our complete blessing. We knew what he was doing from the start. We're going to be changing the Bakers Dozen format next year to make it more interesting and this articulates a lot of the reasons why very well.

That's very nice to hear Doran. Also, this piece - subversive towards a format you are publishing - couldn't appear on a better music website than tQ.

nice! it definitely strikes me as one of the more important pieces of music writing from recent years and one that could definitely alter the way i personally categorise albums by bands

my 2 cents? the whole list thing is killing the industry. know what else people make lists for? the grocerys. laundry lists. lists of 10 ways to keep your man. The hell has this got to do with raw musical passion? the way i see it, you wanna read about music, leave it to the pitchfork boys and anthony fantano. but forget the lists and all this intellectual mumbo jumbo. just some thoughts..

Thanks for the kind words! I'm a big believer in variety though… I likes me some intellectual mumbo jumbo to balance out my raw musical passion. Too much of the latter and not enough of the former and I start feeling like I'm an extra in Point Break.

"my 2 cents? the whole list thing is killing the industry."

I dunno, I feel like the industry has a lot more efficient ways of being killed

"Top Ten Ways In Which The Industry Is Being Killed!" *starts writing list*

Great article, minor gripe – would be nice if there was a View All option instead of having to click 13 times to read the whole thing. I get that you're trying to increase clicks but it's a pain to navigate through it and makes reading it seem kind of disjointed.

hahaha that works well though when page 12 rails against it

~meta~

applauding that piece

yeah I laughed at that bit too

a lot of these are very valid points but I dunno, I like the Baker's Dozen feature, the tokenism and fronting that he talks about here is way more representative of an RYM list - most BD's read more like "these are 13 albums that are important to me that I want to talk about"; like half of 'em have some variation of "ask me tomorrow, and I'll come up with a completely different list"

As someone who loves making lists, Drew's article is OTM and brilliant. Though I think sometimes that's why I like list-making, because the very process of doing it forces me to think about this stuff (well, not the advertising revenue bit, I guess, although if anyone wants to pay me for my "top 50 nuclear war records" list or similar, I'd be very grateful).

It really is spectacular, Drew's piece.

not to be all "squee cuddlestein mountain" but it cheers me up to see these positive responses to the piece, thanks for reading what is a rather long affair. Glad the Quietus were down to present this. Don't wanna weigh in about the comments on the Quietus too much as that's not something I can be objective about, but the invocation of "white guilt" is interesting, to me.

the comments are hilarious

not sure i prefer a 14 page click-thru listicle about why best-of lists suck to a 14 page click-thru listicle of albums worth checking out

tbf there are are still lots of references to and photos of cool albums so arguably i'm getting both recommendations and self-awareness about recommending

Vanity project, emotionally crippled, precious boy, pretentious; it's almost as if you've hit a nerve there Drew, reading those comments ;)

I frequently enjoy the Bakers Dozen, I enjoy artists I am into speaking with passion about records they love, especially when they enthuse me to check out something I am not acquainted with yet. But your essay is already very valuable to me, and I will revisit it and the many interesting perspectives it gives me.

good writing though, last page aggressively otm

recently i interviewed an artist for the quietus and it was originally going to be in the bakers' dozen format - i specifically asked to change that to something more freeform/flexible because the idea of this artist talking about what i'm 100% sure would've been canonical rock records would've bored me to death

(and to the quietus's credit they were 100% ok with me requesting that)

cool story bro

?

are you confused why someone would think your story about the time you asked not to have to write about an artist's favorite albums because you thought their taste in albums would bore you was cool?

there's something self-serving and suspect about Public Displays of Taste.

Doesn't this objection apply far beyond just list-making? Pretty much all public announcements of aesthetic judgment are vulnerable to this suspicion, that what's really at stake is the writers's own narcissism. If list-making is done well, I don't see that it's worse in this respect than other kinds of criticism. Or is there something importantly different (in terms of self-portraiture) between talking about one's favourite records and talking about not-one's-favourite records?

xp i'm confused as to why you're being an aggressive cunt over a pertinent personal experience. if you think i intended to look cool or to self-aggrandise with something as minor as that, how do you even get through basic human interaction every day

If not for "Public Displays of Taste" I dunno what garbage I'd be listening to today. I trust the tastes of someone like say LJ or Dominique Leone a lot; I know DL has posted a few lists here and there and I find them very valuable

not sure "if this is how you react then how do you get through the day" is a stone you really want to throw, lex

i'll throw whatever stones i please. YOU can quit addressing me

just saying, i'm not the one who lost my shit at the mildest intimation of vanity

love the pictures in the article, I had to look up that Algebra Suicide album cuz I didn't recognize it

Me too...looks like it's a compilation.

It also seems to me open to question whether for a display of taste to be self-serving is so repugnant. The ideal of a judgment that isn't in some way a pose seems like either a rockist or Kantian prejudice.

If I am interested in a person, I usually am interested in learning what music is important to them. This was the original point of me reading ILM.

xp i don't think the piece asks for that ideal.

also it seemed to identify narcissism as more of a basic condition which it expands on later in the piece (in the sections on being a friend, on "boring" favorites). i don't think it treats it as a sin or anything, just something that we might not think about as being constructed in these various ways very often, especially if we're close to the action (ime).

anyway, i found this piece getting at all of the reasons i find rateyourmusic culture boring (along with others i hadn't considered) with some clarity and precision. not a fan of the "white guilt" or privilege accusation lobbed at perspectives like this, or other consumers +1ing the status quo / industry insiders sounding like union bosses with their take on "but a list would be just as good".

theres something sinful about being invited by an esteemed internet music publication to give a list of albums by bands and not merely to refuse but to demur in this manner and cast into question the entire ideological foundation of lists of albums by bands culture

who among us has not dreamt of being asked to give a list of albums by bands to an esteemed internet music publication

why would anyone want to write for the sort of ppl leaving comments on that piece

"Favorite" is not an incoherent concept. It means "thing you most favor". Favoring can occur along many dimensions; presumably you can choose any one of them in writing this kind of list, arbitrarily even. The concept itself doesn't presuppose an objective standard of success, or that aesthetic experience can be measured, or that there's any reason that other people should care about your favorites or agree that they're good. None of that suggests that "favorite" is "worryingly unclear", let alone "fatally incoherent", let alone that it "would be best abandoned".

The whole essay raises some worthwhile points, but it's infected by that kind of sloppy jumping to dramatic conclusions. Other examples include the suggestion that to publish a list of your favorite records is be to "force them onto others and level things down to a monoculture in the process" (page 11), or to a a "mandate" that "this is MY favourite, now you MUST listen to it" (page 13).

The part at the end about assigning number scores and rankings to records is interesting, but it doesn't have much to do with choosing a list of favorites, where it's understood that favorite-status can be assigned in any number of idiosyncratic ways.

After reading this, I went back and read my favorite (ha) Baker's Dozen feature, with Mike Watt. It was a nice reminder that writing (or in this case talking) about music can be fun, thought-provoking, and inspiring, even in the dreaded list format. And strangely enough, I didn't feel like Watt was forcing or mandating anything. (His was a heavily male list though, can't fault that point.)

He's having his cake and eating it though. Either in the text or via the photos he's dropping plenty refs to albums and bands but it's an interesting way to do it. The Quietus is great though - partly because they are not about lists, breaking news about videos and all the other shit but I am still a fan of the baker's dozen.

Chris Don
7 hours ago

Listing a few records is possibly less posturing than the pretentious position taken in this piece.

though some of these reasons were better than others, this is the best piece by dd ive read
the comments it provoked are just as enlightening wrt the cognitive biases, aesthetic debility, reflexive woundedness, nostalgia, solipsism, myopic 'short shrift' etc that afflict the british internet

xpost to JRN

Because of the problems that afflict both the false unity of "you" (me when? me now at this moment? this year? over the course of my life?) and "Most" (with regards to which goals? in which context? with the intensity of this "mostness" measured and defined how?), even your allegedly clear and simple phrase "thing you most favor" is itself riven with ambiguities (feel free to claim that I'm holding words to a standard that their practical uses don't often reach if you like). Perhaps "fatally incoherent" was an overstatement as god knows no one is going to stop using it and if it's an intelligible word in a communally shared language then it's not "fatally incoherent", but I think the word badly stands in for the thing it gestures towards, and the thing that word gestures towards is far more complex and more interesting. I'm just being honest in saying that I don't regard "favorite" as a word which can be used clearly, because it doesn't map onto the cumulative effect of decades of passionately loving lots of music for different reasons in different contexts. The statement "lately I've been enjoying Record X" makes sense to me, and indicates both a time frame (recently) and some kind of practice of repeated listenings that were pleasurable. But, as I've stated, "Favorite" doesn't map onto how I listen to stuff, and, I'm guessing, doesn't actually map onto many other people's relationships to music either. Which is why most hardcore music nerds that I know *wince* when they are asked about their favorite band, artist or record- it's a kinda leading question that frames things in a way from the start which obscures what's being talked about. I'm fully capable of having just written a mellow, easygoing, "hey guys here's some records I like" response, and indeed I've done that many, many times for other publications over the years. This time I wanted to do something different.

as for photos, they originally asked me for 13 pictures of myself and at first I sent them that but then I worried that the result would come off as way too narcissistic and self-involved (an objection that obviously the essay itself courts relentlessly) so I took pictures of large swathes of our record collection as clumps / hoards / clusters- the modest intention was that the viewer couldn't tell which record was the "best" "greatest" or "favorite" among the vast moldering piles of crap that fill our house.

Thank you Drew for saying so well what I've been trying and failing to say for years

really loved the one (think it was the last one) about numeric ratings and how gross they are, otm

after this i read through the mika vainio one and its completely predictable, the kraftwerk record the neubaten the coltrane &c and yet if you had asked him to just throw out some things he liked recently it would be a much more valuable

the clickthrough format is enervating as hell but it does provide a sort of penance for the compulsive list reader

the tune is space, what is your relationship with the Nurse With Wound List?

haha yeah in the longer version I went on about how the NWW list was an amazing counter-example in that it's a powerful countercultural syllabus that had this capacity to force noise/industrial/punk people to re-consider their anti-prog snobbery and obviously it's triggered all kinds of re-discoveries, reissues, lore, fandom- guess I'd say that that list functions differently because it was part of the artwork for NWW so it circulated in a different context than present day online journalism, it's pre-listicle and thus worked/works differently. It's also so MANY artists that it spreads beyond the "!0 Best" kind of exceptionalism- it's a hoard unto itself!

nww list is spiritually more like a pastebin dump than a listicle

Because of the problems that afflict both the false unity of "you" (me when? me now at this moment? this year? over the course of my life?) and "Most" (with regards to which goals? in which context? with the intensity of this "mostness" measured and defined how?), even your allegedly clear and simple phrase "thing you most favor" is itself riven with ambiguities)

Like I said, you can favor something in all kinds of ways. That doesn't tell against its coherence. It means that saying that something is your favorite (x) doesn't communicate an idea so clearly that no context need be supplied or explanation given. This is why, when people write about their favorite whatever, they usually give reasons to help the reader understand what they specifically mean. Using the term "favorite" gets them part of the way to conveying what they think and feel about the thing in question. It's all you can really ask from a word.

"Lately I've been enjoying (x)" suffers from similar problems. "Lately" does suggest the recent past, but "recent" is relative. And pleasure or enjoyment can come in all kinds of forms, some of them superficially contradictory--I enjoy things that make me laugh and things that make me cry and things that make me feel hopeful and things that make me feel bleak, and there are subdivisions upon subdivisions of feeling within each of those. Maybe "enjoy" is "riven with ambiguity", too. But that doesn't make it incoherent or uninformative.

"Favorite" doesn't map onto how I listen to stuff, and, I'm guessing, doesn't actually map onto many other people's relationships to music either. Which is why most hardcore music nerds that I know *wince* when they are asked about their favorite band, artist or record- it's a kinda leading question that frames things in a way from the start which obscures what's being talked about.

I don't know what it would mean for the term "favorite" to map onto a person's relationship with music. I also wince a little at the idea of being asked to supply my favorite song or record, but that's because there are all kinds of ways for something to be my favorite, and some of them are difficult or impossible to compare. That's consistent with everything I've said, though.

The broader point here is that your anxiety about favorites seems unconnected to your stance against formally-awarded scores and rankings. Unless you think it's a slippery slope from degree concepts to ten point scales, in which case I've got bad news about evaluative language in general.

ok now really ttws, just give us the real list

"there are all kinds of ways for something to be my favorite, and some of them are difficult or impossible to compare"

er, yeah, that's why I'm saying the term is incoherent- the divergence of these very kinds from each other looks like a problem to me insofar as it muddles together rather different kinds of pleasures and stances and attitudes, so, when you say "you can favor something in all kinds of ways. That doesn't tell against its coherence", I'm suggesting that it *does* tell against its coherence.

That said, I really don't think that "incoherent" is necessarily "bad"- I wrote a book about the generative indeterminacy of melancholy, a productively incoherent concept wedged between incommensurable Aristotelian and Galenic understandings; the book argued that the "problem space" defined by that very incoherence generated all kinds of great works of art- so it's not as if "incoherence" can't generate things worth thinking about- it certainly can.

the fate of western civilization rests on the preservation of the ranked listicle for future generations

elephant in the room here is ilx's own poll obsession

The comments on that article make me want to put everybody on the internet on a boat and float them out to sea.

Re: the incoherence of rankings, I've always cited Vice of all magazines as having the best system, they are doing it while sending it up, even when they were numeric they'd review a Hrvatski record and say "a Polish marching band walked by my window while this was playing and *mind blown*! 10/10"

elephant in the room here is ilx's own poll obsession

they're fun to do and fun to read, and they can aid those who are new to a particular artist (or give new perspective to those who already know them), so what's the harm?

best thing about the ilx poll threads is the renewed discussion around the artist and the music. the polls create the opportunity to exhaustively go through an entire catalog of someone's work. feel like a lot of people (definitely myself) could give a shit about the rankings themselves.

and you'll notice that once the ranking ends and we have the list, the thread dies and people just start posting their individual ballots. the listing is the least interesting part of poll threads, but the reason so many of them have like 1000 posts is because people are having substantive discussion about the artist.

I do think it's great when a song that I have no recollection of ranks really high, prompting "I should go listen to that one again" and usually "yeah, this is quite good isn't it?"

by contrast the "what are you listening to" and "your favorite records of them moment, fuck" threads are boring as shit because people just post a list of things without discussion

yeah that's the bit I hate, even a sentence or two about why you like X or Y is incredibly useful

I really dislike this sort of thing on boards like RYM, where someone will say something like "anyone got any good electronic recs?" and someone will post a list of 30 different artists and nothing else. How is that useful to anyone??

For lists, I agree, most are kind of boring, and per Drew's great article, there are so many angles involved in public lists that sometimes I feel a little contaminated reading them. However, if a musician I like lists a bunch of music they're into, you're damn right I'm looking at it. Likewise, if some publication ranks, say, the 10 best French prog records, I will look at it -- not because I want validation, or because I actually expect to learn something (tho I might) -- but because that's some of *my* favorite music of all time. I want to see if they're getting it right! I mean, I say that with some tongue in cheek, but I have certainly voiced my disagreement with a website list in the past, when I felt strongly -- and funny enough, it's partly how I got my first real writing gig.

On ILM, lists and polls just seem to be part of the experience. I don't always appreciate with that experience (let alone the lists themselves). It can feel cheap, fake, superficial, like cutting corners to discussion. But come on, why wouldn't I want to know what milton parker is listening to? Or, why wouldn't I want to read about John Darnielle's favorite black metal records? Especially when the reader is somewhat knowledgeable about what's being discussed (or knows the list maker), all the weird ways lists can function don't necessarily matter so much. They're shortcuts, and if I want to know more, I'll just ask the writers.

I'd be happy to discuss more in depth on those threads myself! The risk is sometimes long posts get ignored and then I feel a little silly for wasting the time. But yeah those threads need a little more to them.

reading a list is like going to a gallery to look at trees

ILM polls have pretty much replaced Classic or Dud threads now because we've decided all music is dud.

the modest intention was that the viewer couldn't tell which record was the "best" "greatest" or "favorite" among the vast moldering piles of crap that fill our house.

this is what I loved about it, all the Jethro Tull and Connie Francis mixed in with NWW and TG

I've always like the way Nicolas Lutz paints over the middles of all his records, the idea that they only exist when being played, that all information about them is gradually forgotten. I still havent done anything like that myself yet though I generally forget the names of records

Picking "winners and losers" is the job of criticism though, as I see it, unless I'm reading Drew wrong.

I think you're seeing criticism wrong. Winners of what? According to whom? My ish w objective criticism is that the critic replaces their subjective self with the holy ghost of "canon", speaking on behalf of an invisible force. As Drew points out, it is good art's job to topple, not buttress, good art is not created to win or lose anything.

fgti otm that para should be hammered into every critic's brain repeatedly

Well, I meant, "This is a good album; here's why it's better than the last one." If you wanna call it winners and losers, sure.

My ish w objective criticism

no such thing, right?

I agree that "canon" is a dodgy subject but let's not forget that there's more music out there than anyone could possibly ever listen to in their lifetime, I don't mind having some direction

to unlearn as much as to learn! walk a different way to work tomorrow and see some different trees. you dont have to visit the taj mahal

Great post from Dominique there. Or am I just saying that coz I like his music? ;)

(on cue, All Spectacular comes onto my shuffle)

However, if a musician I like lists a bunch of music they're into, you're damn right I'm looking at it. Likewise, if some publication ranks, say, the 10 best French prog records, I will look at it -- not because I want validation, or because I actually expect to learn something (tho I might) -- but because that's some of *my* favorite music of all time. I want to see if they're getting it right! I mean, I say that with some tongue in cheek, but I have certainly voiced my disagreement with a website list in the past, when I felt strongly -- and funny enough, it's partly how I got my first real writing gig.

OTM, although maybe Buzzfeed or whatever should employ more musicians for this purpose.

it's all down to the shifting requirement of the music critic. most people don't read music crit as a buyer's guide any more. generally speaking, i sit down to read reviews after i've heard the records as a way to find out more about what i'm listening to and get interesting new perspectives.

to paraphrase Whiney at a Twitter conference ages ago - it's all about the 'why', not so much about whether or not it's a 'good' record.

Nobody is saying "let's stop being enthusiastic and screaming about music we love and hate". Just stop doing so with numbers and comparative chin-stroke and ballots. We wonder why people are like "wow 2014 is a bad year for music" it's because we're at peak levels of thinking a 7.0 is "above average" and "good".

or maybe there's just not as much music that excites the population of ilm out there. i totally agree with drew's article, but it's still acceptable to say 'i don't like this record or this artist' or 'i prefer this over that'. giving things a grade makes little sense though, it's not a coursework assignment.

I get that looking at criticism through the capitalist "here's the winner" prism is dangerous.

recent rolling stone 1984 pop list was a pretty great example of how lists can function, though i realize that's really predicated on the year (and the fitful waves of nostalgia caused) and the form (pop)

the funny thing about this debate is that neither "well-written, informed but honestly subjective descriptions of experience" nor "faux-objective estimations with ratings" pay many mortgages these days, though i suppose that suggests one might as well aim for the former if they're going to bother at all

It is not the review itself but the fact it is reviewed that gives it the seal of approval. that it is considered worthy of words and inches, these records are the winners, somebody somewhere wanted the words

It is not the review itself but the fact it is reviewed that gives it the seal of approval. that it is considered worthy of words and inches, these records are the winners, somebody somewhere wanted the words

― saer, Friday, September 26, 2014 4:01 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this has become so apparent in the last few years especially. no one remembers whether any given publication gave any given album a good or bad review, but if that artist is continually covered in a publication's NEWS section...that is the real seal of approval. (an artist can even score a good review, but if they don't make the news cycle, no one cares)

yes. i admit i often fall into the trap of judging music on whether ILM itself would give an artist/album not only the seal of approval, but any attention at all. This is a ridiculous admission, of course.

the only reason i ever read that dusted site was for the lists. matmos did a good one. lists made by musicians are pretty much the only lists i read. basically, i just love reading what musicians have to say about other music. always my favorite part of any music magazine like the wire or mojo.

yea^

the photographs in the dd piece were like cheese in healthy soup

count me in the "lists are actually pretty OK" category but they should be either:

- well-written lists, in which case it just becomes another framework for organizing good writing, and one that results in less transitional cruft at least;

- lists with unexpected entries. this can even be context-free -- my best music discoveries in 2014 were from actual file directories with nothing but the filename -- as long as you are encountering something you wouldn't otherwise encounter. they don't have to be by musicians, just by someone who knows what they're talking about and whose taste is broad. (for instance, a list of 30 different artists and nothing else gives me 30 names to Google! and who knows how many once factoring in side projects and the like.)

archives are lists, things already have listableness in them, curating and presenting does not have to be tied to personal preference (favorites) or history, it can be active and political, using objects to open onto something else.

i got an e-mail from someone who wanted to do a documentary on a list i did for decibel magazine. which was weird. i guess the idea was to document how hard it was to track everything down on the list in actual record stores? it had taken this person years...

someone made a quiz out of my noise list:

"How many did you heard from beggining to end?"

http://www.listchallenges.com/top-25-noise-albums-according-to-decibel-magazine

theres a difference between lists and inventories, scaruffi.com is an inventory (if sometimes an inventory of lists sure), the nww list is really an inventory; lists are finite, maintained, curated, anankastic rhetorical devices; inventories are exhaustive, proliferating, they hide nothing and freely reveal the limits and limitations of their authors

I like that distinction

I have only heard six of those noise albums in full, revoke my noise cred now

btw that's a good list, will check some of those out

yeah, i dunno, good idiosyncratic lists with good writing attached can be fun to read. they mostly make my eyes glaze over though. the internet will do that to you. i've definitely learned a lot from random RYM lists of weirdness and Youtube playlists. and those are obviously just data for the most part. i liked dd's thing a lot though. i just enjoy reading him. reduction on the web seems like a logical response to the too-muchness of the web. it makes sense to me. sometimes people come in my store and they can't take it all in and they end up buying whatever i'm playing on the turntable at the moment.

not so much about whether or not it's a 'good' record

as a writer and reader of music coverage, whether a record is "good" is one of the least interesting aspects of a review for me. i just like learning about the music and watching the writer think, draw connections, be inspired.

obviously if something is fucking terrible i'd like to know, but most music exists in the space between 0.0 and 10.

You are wrong. You fuck with it or you don't, there is only 0 or 10.

I mean I only read the 0s and 10s on Singles Jukebox :/ I don't care about your 6s

if i didn't read 6s i'd never read alfred

"i want your 6" -george michael in 2014

6 is natural
6 is good
not every song scores it
but every song should

i posit that this is an example of a great list http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/50-best-bootleg-bart-t-shirts.html

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/content/dam/vulture/slideshows/2014/9/bootleg-bart/boot-leg-bart-18.jpg.r.nocrop.w610.h610.jpg
skuhfkesnfkebggeukfj

in non list-related but great music writing I really enjoyed Damon Krukowski's article on mono http://pitchfork.com/features/oped/9492-back-to-mono/ - it's a good historical presentation, it explains how sound works really well and makes a good case for advantages to mono. He's written quite a few good articles for p4k, would like more. I like his tone and style, reminds me a bit of Byrne in How Music Works.

I saw some Twitter lolling when that article came out but many many mixers just work in mono and/or almost mono without even thinking about it. I called around! Drums in mono, overheads super narrow, it makes sense. Ideally I'd love one and the other for different contexts. Stereo recordings sound weird in public places.

it's weird when i hear a recent/modern pop/rock/indie rock record that uses stereo sound in an interesting/creative way. noticeable. remarkable. most stuff could be mono and nobody would be the wiser. most of it sounds mono.

I wrote about this last year, when that box set of nine Miles Davis albums, reissued in mono, came out - I would love to see labels like Posi-Tone or Criss Cross switch over to mono.

most stuff could be mono and nobody would be the wiser.

This is otm. Listening to Cheap Trick's debut recently, it dawned on me that the fact that the drums are mixed mono does nothing to diminish the power of the music; if anything, said power is accentuated.

Some stereo drum mixes are ridiculous. Panning the hi-hat hard right only makes sense if the listener's head is positioned where the snare drum is, and facing the drummer. If you're sitting four (or three, or even two) feet in front of a drummer, you will not hear the hi-hat only in your right ear.

As a guy who got a state college education in Aesthetics, my knee-jerk reaction to that title was “Fuck yeah! Finally someone speaking up about this music ‘journalism’ bullshit.” Then I read the article and found myself shaking my head, going “No, no, no, Drew, you’re not wrong, you’re just totally missing the point.” I literally never feel the urge to call someone out online for being wrong or misguided or whatever, let alone do any sort of long-form writing on AGB, but I felt like Drew was begging for a conversation about this, that he was intentionally pushing people’s buttons (while still being true to his opinions), and that I actually had a strong enough opinion of my own (again, very rare) that I should respond to Drew’s rant and make people not feel bad about saying something like The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid is their favorite ambient record.

Not fully read it yet, but Fact just pointed to and approved of this long reply to Drew's piece here

That piece also misses the point, as I see it. Numerical ratings, Baker's Dozen lists, democratic procedures of list-creation like Metacritic, or voted-by-critic pools like Polaris, they create an illusion of "objectivity" and that is the problem. Under that pretence, all 13 of Drew's arguments are in fact true. The pretence of objectivity. It's reinforced in the language used by music writers, when they presume to speak on behalf of everybody instead of themselves or their publication alone. All my absolute favourite writers put themselves at the heart of their criticism, take responsibility for what they praise and what they pan, instead of being some illusive ghost prophet. I mean, I didn't actually realize that the Baker's Dozen thing was supposed to be an "all time" list, tbh, I assumed it was meant to be fun and subjective, just like Quietus usually is

It's reinforced in the language used by music writers, when they presume to speak on behalf of everybody instead of themselves or their publication alone.

Speaking on behalf of the publication is often the publication's house style, not a decision made by the writer. I'm all for the "I."

I don't think it's bad to say that some albums are better than others. I have a friend who gets very cynical about any sort of Rotten Tomatoes/Rate Your Music type site, because "why form your own opinion?" - to which my response is "just see every movie and listen to every album, then you can!"

Well yeah! The delusion-of-objectivity holds writers back just as much as it eradicates enthusiasm in audiences xp

It's different for video games and films. I always look to Rotten Tomatoes and other numerically-based review sites for video games and blockbuster films because at the heart of those art forms is the necessity of functionality. Gameplay has to be tight, i.e. 3D has to titillate. That famous argument that Hideo Kojima had that video games like food cannot be considered "art" because they still have to be playable, be edible. Not like music or dance or lit

I tend to like writers that express fannish enthusiasms about things, and lists are an outlet for fan enthusiasm. There's a kind of arrogance involved, though I wouldn't characterize it as arrogance to objectivity. It's more like arrogating to tell the world what is good. I don't need writers always to be careful thinkers. Sometimes imposing absurd hierarchies is more fun and more reflective of the writer's honest feelings.

Luke Haines and Peter Hammill weigh in:

https://twitter.com/LukeHaines_News/status/515127513212026880

They only have to be functional for the player to understand the controls. A game like Minecraft doesn't really explain anything to you and has no clear objective, for one.

xposts

Yeah I don't agree with Kojima of course, but I only play ADOM and I only eat Chipotle

pompous drivel shock!

ha fuck that guy

well this is Luke Haines we're talking about

i remember that guy from the 90's. he was debonair.

He's widened a bit

thank god peter hammill is here to save us from pomposity

i mean i love the guy but that's a bit rich

LOL (xp)

the guy from VDGG calling out pompous things is so many levels...

Maybe he's gone all Chas + Dave in his old age

Fuck yeah! Finally someone speaking up about this music ‘journalism’ bullshit.

can we please replace the awful "my god it's made of girls" ILM board description with this

...got my beer on the mellotron here, let mother sort it out if he comes round here...

*flute solo*

I mean, I didn't actually realize that the Baker's Dozen thing was supposed to be an "all time" list, tbh, I assumed it was meant to be fun and subjective, just like Quietus usually is

It isn't. We tell people to interpret it however they want and we also offer them the choice of doing themed lists - no matter how weird or obscure.

crüt otm

XP: See The Haxan Cloak's recent favourite teenage metal albums list as an example.

oh man i want to do a weird obscure list! i'm not famous though...or in deerhoof or whatever.

i have my list-y moments.

I'm working on one at the moment... my 13 favourite screen drunks. We may blast the idea into smithereens after Xmas.

I've picked up some amazing LPs via Bakers Dozen and that was maybe the secondary or tertiary reason for me starting the series originally but after a while it did feel like I wasn't reading enough interesting choices after a while. So it feels like just giving people the option isn't maybe enough, like we have to actually pro-actively say to people, 'Will you choose your 13 favourite Turkish psych records' or 'Will you choose your 13 favourite horror sound tracks?' just to get it back to more of a potential buyer's guide or listening recommendation device.

I would do: 13 Records that Dr*w Dan*el Would LOVE to Pieces!

I loved doing mine w Luke but was disappointed that I didn't actually go deep with the how's and why's of Total Freedom's music saving my life

:///////

*squares hero-worship of hammill w/ all this, can't, weeps*

i suppose his thing was always to stray the slightly wrong side of emotional largesse & get away with it on the strength of the music, plus he's fairly seasoned now, not that this is an excuse

I like A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers as much as the next man but that was a major own goal right there.

Personal taste in music is transferable. Because if somebody- anybody, really, doesn't have to be someone I know or care about- is sufficiently enthusiastic about a record, I am going to listen to it in a different way, and after I am done there are two likely outcomes: I will love the record, or I will hate that person. There are plenty of bands I simply didn't like until I read a recommendation from someone who was really enthusiastic about that band in a compelling and persuasive way.

This looks wonderful (and organised by an ur-ilxor, too). The list of contributors is v.strong.

http://marksinker.co.uk/birkbeck_under_over.html
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/underground-overground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85
http://therockwriteproject.tumblr.com/

UNDERGROUND / OVERGROUND
The Changing Politics of UK Music Writing: 1968-85

This will be a two-day symposium at London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, consisting of panel discussions and Q&As. Run by Mark Sinker, former editor of The Wire, it will bring together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s and 80s with academics and other media commentators, to discuss the emergence and evolution of the countercultural voice in the UK, as inflected through the rock papers between these dates. The plan is for proceedings to be recorded and transcribed, to form the core of a subsequent published collection, alongside additional memoirs and essays from participants (especially those unable to attend).

so mad i won't be able to fly to london for this.

That does look like a great May event:

Simon Frith , Paul Gilroy, Barney Hoskyns, Cynthia Rose, Charles Shaar Murray ,Bob Stanley Richard Williams and more

ILX's Michaelangelo Matos has the best Christgau interview from his book tour up on Red Bull Music Academy. Fantastic piece:
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/robert-christgau-interview

Another good post from Damon http://pitchfork.com/features/oped/9667-drop-the-bass-a-case-against-subwoofers/ - apparently he's writing a book. Good news.

On a different note: I'm going to see the Patti Smith Horses tour in a month, and I was thinking I should read up beforehand and then I looked up the 33 1/3 book on Horses, but judging from the user reviews it deals mainly with post-structuralist thought / academia stuff, and so I figured nah I'll just reread Just Kids. Made me think about what I like in music writing, which is not really clever analysis, more like narrative and poetry.

I read that Horses book when it came out and I don't remember it being that academic-y. What I found strange about it was the amount of space the author devoted to Smith's life and career leading up to the album, only giving the album itself an inordinately brief song-by-song analysis. I think any fan of the record will find entertaining, if not particularly revelatory, but I can't really argue with the decision to reread Just Kids again instead.

A double dose of Taylors - love both of these.
Jia Tolentino reviews Taylor Swift in Washington DC for Jezebel: http://themuse.jezebel.com/taylor-swift-is-definitely-in-her-zone-1718196417
Taylor Parkes interviews Sleaford Mods for The Quietus: http://thequietus.com/articles/18327-sleaford-mods-interview-2

Not sure if this is the canonical Best Music Writing thread, but anyhow I'm greatly enjoying (most of) the writing on this site, as well as the tournament they're running and the 90s nostalgia it is inducing: http://www.marchfadness.com/

(also rooting for "Groove is in the Heart" to take the title)

who is voting on it? some pretty shameful results there so far

but i did just read some of the essays and i will agree there is good writing to be found

Anybody can vote! Look in the "current games" page. I think lots people are voting for the more faddish songs rather than the best songs, hence the embarrassing results.

the writing is good but scanning the list of writers I do not see many people known for writing about music, and do see rick moody, which is a trend that (selfishly, obviously) worries me

Anybody can vote! Look in the "current games" page. I think lots people are voting for the more faddish songs rather than the best songs, hence the embarrassing results.

*of

I wasn't familiar with Rick Moody but I will brace myself because I guess he'll be writing the Final Four analysis this year again.

Anyway, vote for Deee-Lite everyone!

If everyone could go and vote against "Torn" today, I'd be much obliged: http://www.marchfadness.com/#/championship/

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/15/520133445/culture-wars-trap-innovation-atlanta-hip-hop

thought this was kinda worthy (mumble rap thread participants may disagree. I dunno)

what would be their objections?

Too superficial maybe. Others might say "well of course the city is not supporting 'trap' culture"

Damn, Quincy Jones has some stories: https://www.gq.com/story/quincy-jones-has-a-story